I’m not really a fan of horse racing and I’ve never been to the Kentucky Derby. Perhaps I should someday, since my mother was from Kentucky (she always told me Kentucky was the state of fast horses and beautiful women. Or was that the other way around?) It might be because my grandfather got me
A friend of mine has been sending me links to historical photos, which, as a history nerd, I think are worth sharing. There is no central theme except they are in the past, and I think they speak for themselves. Group One (Scroll down) — https://soulfoodfriday.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/getting-some-historic-perspective1.pdf Group Two (Click on each photo to move to
History never ceases to amaze me. For example — In 1883, a 145-page volume entitled A Book of Medical Discourses in Two Parts was published. Its appearance was significant for two reasons. It was one of the first American medical guides to offer advice for women and children, including a bit of marital advice. More
Few would consider Herbert Hoover a successful president; his name has become synonymous with the Great Depression. But knowing full well that much of history never makes it into your average history book, I decided to get a good biography and see for myself, especially since I’d recently finished reading about Woodrow Wilson and the
With all the current debate about migrants, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by a recent article entitled “The Accidents of History That Shaped Global Migration” by James Watkins (https://www.ozy.com/acumen/the-accidents-of-history-that-shaped-global-migration/76888?). I already knew that many Irish settled in Boston, especially during the Great Famine of 1845-49 when the potato crop failed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)), because that was
I remember when I was a student teacher and I asked a class to tell me what they knew about the Persians. My cooperating teacher quickly informed me they had never studied that civilization. I thought of this as I reviewed an email from the National Geographic Society listing some long-forgotten civilizations. There have been
The issue of Confederate monuments was such a hot topic in the recent past that an article in the December 2018 Smithsonian magazine couldn’t help but get my attention. Entitled “The Costs of the Confederacy” by Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler, it claims that taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate monuments
I’ve always been amazed about how much history never makes it into the schoolbooks. We all know how Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 triggered Southern states leaving the Union, and the Civil War. But go back four years to the election of 1856. The winner was James Buchanan, who had been born in Pennsylvania but
Some historians rate Woodrow Wilson as a near-great president, which always made me curious because he is most remembered for his idealistic League of Nations proposal, which his own country shunned. So my curiosity led me to Wilson, a highly rated biography by A. Scott Berg. The truth is Woodrow Wilson lived a life of
As a history nerd, I know there are lots of strange stories during wartime. This is right up there with them. On a hill near the village of Itter in Austria sits a small castle that during World War II was seized by the Waffen SS and converted into a prison camp for high-profile prisoners